i'm not claiming that there is no evidence of violence in human culture - clearly, there is, most particularly in the culture i live in. but it appears that there is also evidence of cultures without violence.

and seriously - killing something to eat is just the same as violence against members of your own society? i guess the fact that people occasionally step on ants is the ultimate proof that we are all nothing but wild animals.

and please, please, get it through your thick thick skull: I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT CHANGING AN EXISTING CULTURE. I AM ASKING WHETHER A RAPE-FREE CULTURE DOES OR CAN EXIST. war-free cultures exist, despite the fact that war-centered cultures also exist. given that cultures with major problems with rape exist - does that make it impossible for cultures without rape to exist? EXIST FROM THEIR OWN BEGINNINGS - NOT ALTERED FROM SOME EXISTING RAPE-FILLED CULTURE. there are many many cultures out there, and there have been even more. what i want is an anthropological survey, not a crimology seminar.

but since this at least the third time i have stated that I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT CHANGING EXISTING CULTURES, i have to put you response down to willful ignorance, and leave the discussion there._________________aka: neverscared!
a flux of vibrant matter

My apologies, mouse; you did indeed make that point several times. If my ignorance was willful, it was not from a desire to annoy you. I'm an engineer; I'm used to dealing with the concrete and observable, and to thinking in terms of what I can make, change, or improve. That mode of thinking has gotten deeply ingrained over the course of my career, I'm afraid. I'm sorry that I've offered offense by following my habits instead of listening closer to what you were saying._________________I am only a somewhat arbitrary sequence of raised and lowered voltages to which your mind insists upon assigning meaning

What explains war, then? Or genocide? Being "rarely violent" is not the same as being "never violent." And plenty of wars have been fought and entire peoples eradicated for no other reason than to secure resources. And many others have been fought specifically to respond to aggressors seeking to secure resources.

But you're taking certain extreme scenarios, trying to get a pattern out of it, and then extrapolating that to all human interactions and stating that this urge for competitive violence is a universal, underlying force which must constantly be held in check by The Forces Of Culture (tm).

And then you're using that to say why rape is inevitable.

There are some major flaws of logic in there. For one, you didn't even address my note that much of our competition is also cooperative. A propensity for cooperative violence (a la, say, a hunting party), even if it exists, does not explain individual people who commit violent acts alone. Saying "war exists" doesn't explain murder on an individual level. Nor does murder on an individual level explain war.

And you still haven't addressed - indeed, have thoroughly avoided - the fact that committing rape is not the same as hitting somebody. Unless you are arguing that upon getting angry with somebody most people's first thought is to have intercourse with them, your whole schtick about "people are inherently violent ergo rape" makes no sense.

bitflipper wrote:

I, myself, pointed out that we generally sublimate our aggressive territorial and domination urges into commerce and status symbols (and even into argument, for that matter), but there's a whole world's worth of difference between "generally" and "always;" that world being the difference between empirical reality and Platonic fantasy.

I don't know if this is a cultural thing or what, but personally, I don't "sublimate my aggressive territorial and domination urges into commerce and status symbols." Argument is a learned skill for me, borne of necessity and environment. I do not like fierce competition. I prefer to compete in a cooperative environment where stakes do not matter and the only issue is testing of individual skills against our own prior abilities. I do not like having "losers."

So no, I completely reject your underlying assumption that most of our society - from business, to sports, to clothing and car purchases, to mate selection - is about some perverse form of so-called "primate politics." This whole "alpha male" theory of mammalian social structure was popular for a while, sure, but it just doesn't hold water in the real world. Evolutionary psychologists tried to say it was true for wolves (turns out its not), horses (saying stallions "lead from behind" rather than following the lead mare...yeah, okay), etc. But really, it's hard to see that as anything other than an attempt to justify male-centered hierarchy in humans.

Because if you are saying that competitive violence is a primary underlying and instinctual basis for human interaction, you are saying that sexism and sex-based hierarchies are a "natural" and possibly inevitable state of human society. If we are competitive through violence, then most of the time the most significant positions will end up being held by violent, physically strong men.

And by society that we are "sublimating" these urges by forcing a social structure onto ourselves which tell us to be good, well, then that's essentially saying that men are agreeing to let women be equal but that it isn't our natural state.

Which is more or less Nice Guy-ing all of human society. What do women owe you kind men for being willing to fight all of your violent urges for us?

So I would ask you to seriously rethink your underlying assumptions on this issue.

bitflipper wrote:

Then whence comes the word "force-feed?" Or are you specifically talking about inducing some sort of hypothetical humiliation via force-feeding?

The latter, natch, or it wouldn't be an equivalent to rape.

bitflipper wrote:

And yet, can you name any concrete example of such a culture? I'm aware of none. I strongly suspect that I am aware of none because there are none, that they are in fact not within the realm of possibility, because that is not how humans have evolved.

The fact of the matter is that we have a very, very narrow scope of human cultures which we know anything about. If you're telling me you are assuming it isn't possible simply because the tiny snippet of human culture which has been addressed by historians and anthropologists hasn't had this kind of thing recorded, then I'm calling BS. The lack of specific evidence in this context isn't evidence of anything.

bitflipper wrote:

Whereas we have very definitely evolved to use violence and dominance, as plainly evidenced by the fact that we notoriously do so, as does any other wild animal.

(...)

I'm not saying rape is about violence; I'm saying it's about dominance in a species that evolved to use violence and dominance.

But what constitutes a form of domination is culturally determined not innate. There is nothing innately dominating about engaging with someone sexually, just like there is nothing innately dominating about feeding someone, or innately dominating about getting payment from someone, or innately dominating about taking someone's things.

For something to be an act of domination it has to mean that to both the party attempting to assert domination and the party intended to receive the message of submission understand the act in that context.

Do you remember that big hoopla about men in the Amish community holding someone down and cutting his beard? The response for many people outside the community was, at first, one of confusion as to why they would bother assaulting someone in that way and why it was considered a big deal by the victim. It's only in a culture in which the act of cutting hair is demonstrative of disgrace that the act makes sense and is clearly one of domination.

What is it about sex in our society that it is so closely linked to that? That was the original point in my discussion. I stated that rape is used because sex is already linked with domination.

bitflipper wrote:

A child doesn't get raped because he's black, or white, or hispanic; he gets raped because his rapist is asserting a position of dominance over the child. Same for women, same for male prison inmates, same for just about all rape victims. The victim is chosen by the rapist because the rapist feels the victim is weaker. Otherwise, rape victims would be limited to a particular gender, race, creed, or some other specific demographic, and they aren't.

And why does the rapist "feel the victim is weaker"? The fact of the matter is that minority children are abused at higher rates than race-privileged children. Women are perceived of being socially weaker. It's not a matter of physical strength that's being asserted but social domination which is entirely cultural. I notice you didn't talk about the practice of raping "feminized" males such as gay men or women with trans history, who usually don't have any meaningful physical disadvantage vis a vis their attacker.

And most rape isn't this form of violent, hold-em-down act of force you seem to be imagining. Most of it involves social engineering, and the amount of overt force might be negligible. So the form of the domination being undertaken is entirely cultural/psycho-social, and I see no evidence that any underlying "desire for violent domination" would be fulfilled by this kind of act.

bitflipper wrote:

Tahpenes wrote:

Rape is much more comparable to lynching than it is to murder or simple assaults.

Actually, rape is much more comparable to bullying than to mob "justice." The vigilante committees and the Klan did indeed generally choose their victims on a basis of ethnic background. Bullies don't, though; they'll just pick on whoever looks weaker, and do so specifically because the victim looks weaker.

If you really think that women are raped with such horrific disproportion because we "look weaker," then somebody needs to find a 101 link to give you. Rape is not about dropping the soap and physical vulnerability. Women are raped because the rapists hate women; that's been pretty well studied. See, e.g., this discussion.

You might as well say that the KKK targeted people who "looked" weaker, because the fact of the matter is that much of the reason why they could get away with lynchings is because the police departments, judges, and DAs offices would not prosecute the crimes. Hell, a lot of the time they were participants. So the victims were, indeed, "weaker" than the murderers in a social sense.

Rape is not a crime of "bullying." It's a crime in which the perpetrators specifically target certain classifications of people. It's a hate crime.

I suppose there's not much I can say to any of that, so, I have no answer for rape other than punishment and no explanation for human violence other than a dismayed, "Well, that's just the way it is."_________________I am only a somewhat arbitrary sequence of raised and lowered voltages to which your mind insists upon assigning meaning

I will insist. Violence doesn't require physical harm. The Ludovico technique is high class psychological violence that leaves the body of the victim unharmed, for instance.

Leaders are normally people that will often take the chance to rise up by metaphorically crushing the opposition. That's violence._________________Welcome to Sinfest, the only place with a 46 pages long thread about sentient toasters

Why does Monique get tomatoes thrown at her? why does the audience not just listen to what she says and then go home and think about it? Why don't they do some research and read up on what she discusses? Why do they want her to 'shake her ass' and not 'rant about the patriarchy'? Why is her saying 'patriarchy' considered the same as 'bashing them over the head with a hammer'?

The alternative was inventing my own method of torture, but as I wrote my ideas it was getting all sorts of sick.

Just goes to prove that under that suave, castilian* exterior, you're just as Hobbes-ianly human as the rest of us.

*The term probably gains something in translation; as I recall, in Spain, castellano simply refers to the regions of Castille and de La Mancha. In American English, though, the term carries connotations of nobility, particularly of a quixotic nature._________________I am only a somewhat arbitrary sequence of raised and lowered voltages to which your mind insists upon assigning meaning

The alternative was inventing my own method of torture, but as I wrote my ideas it was getting all sorts of sick.

Just goes to prove that under that suave, castilian* exterior, you're just as Hobbes-ianly human as the rest of us.

*The term probably gains something in translation; as I recall, in Spain, castellano simply refers to the regions of Castille and de La Mancha. In American English, though, the term carries connotations of nobility, particularly of a quixotic nature.

I'm a creative type. Creativity happens to be a dangerous thing.

Also in not-Spain Spanish speaking countries, Castellano is an informal name for the Spanish language, so there you have another meaning. I'm guessing that it has to do with the fact that the crown of Castille sent most of the explorers and other guys that imposed the language._________________Welcome to Sinfest, the only place with a 46 pages long thread about sentient toasters

My apologies, mouse; you did indeed make that point several times. If my ignorance was willful, it was not from a desire to annoy you. I'm an engineer; I'm used to dealing with the concrete and observable, and to thinking in terms of what I can make, change, or improve. That mode of thinking has gotten deeply ingrained over the course of my career, I'm afraid. I'm sorry that I've offered offense by following my habits instead of listening closer to what you were saying.

ok, different mindsets. i'm a data analyst; i'm very aware of differences between populations because i spend a lot of time figuring out what, exactly a population is doing, and why it does it.

_then_ i figure out how to fix it. _________________aka: neverscared!
a flux of vibrant matter

The engineering credo: grab your hammer, first; you can always fix later what you fix now. _________________I am only a somewhat arbitrary sequence of raised and lowered voltages to which your mind insists upon assigning meaning

...This whole "alpha male" theory of mammalian social structure was popular for a while, sure, but it just doesn't hold water in the real world. ..

Well, from a scientific standpoint it never made sense to me that people keep thinking of it. Not that I don't get the whole Alpha, Beta, etc hierarchy in social animals. And actually, I can see some areas where we share that similarity with our Great Ape cousins. But for some reason people ignore one important thing. In a band of gorillas there might be an Alpha Male, but there is also an Alpha Female. In fact, in social animals there can be situations where the Alpha is only ever female or only ever male. There can also be situations where there is both an Alpha female and an Alpha male. And of course, all of this is only valid for hierarchical social animals. So there can be social animals without an Alpha._________________My deviantArt - Blog-ity blog